Shame my supermarket is closed. I would've bought 10 more rolls of tin foil for my hats.

The problem isn't me eating bacon, the problem is that my bacon is produced intertnationally. It's the industrial globalisation of of our food that's causing the biggest problems. Why do I see south african strawberries and argentinian beef in my supermarket? I live in middle europe, strawberries and cows have an awesome time here. Because it's cheaper, it costs the corporations less money to ship their product around the globe than producing it locally. There are less regulastions to follow. The local farmer takes too much money for his cow and strawberries don't grow here in January. We can't have the customer pay a Euro or two more for for his steak. We can't have the customers wait until April for strawberries. We want it now and as cheaply as possible. That's why we eat more meat than ever, that's why my steak damages the environment more than ever.
Globalisation is a wonderful thing but it isn't without consequences.

Once upon a time I had an ABBA earworm. I cought myself humming Dancing Queen at the supermarket checkout. That's when I knew I had a serious problem.

Living in Thailand, I've grown to really appreciate locally grown meat and produce in comparison to massive factory farm stuff.

One good example: Tilapia fish. Back home in the US, I thought Tilapia was disgusting. It tastes like algae, because they are raised in man-made concrete tanks and fed exclusively on algae that is easy to grow. They won't breed in those conditions, so they have to pump in hormones to basically force them to reproduce, more hormones to make them grow quickly, etc. etc.

Here in Thailand, I live in a town close to a lake. If you go to the lake you can see huge enclosures made of nets, which keep the Tilapia contained but otherwise living very normal fish lives. They get a natural lake diet of insects, plants, etc., no need to give them any extra food. They reproduce without any encouragement.

Talk to one of the fish farmers, and they will pull up some of the net and present you with several fish to choose from. Point one out and they will pull it out, smack it on the head to kill it instantly, and then scale and gut it for you and put it in a bag. From alive in the lake to dinner in 15-20 minutes.

Or, if you go to a local market in town, people have stalls set up that serve the middleman function. They go to the lake and buy 20-50 Tilapia to put into a big tank in the back of their pickup, and keep them alive in there for a day or two until they are sold, for a slight markup so you don't have to drive out to the lake.


Roughly the same thing applies to pork, chicken, and most fruits and vegetables. Somewhat for beef also, but there is less of that since most Thais follow a branch of Buddhism that discourages killing/eating cows. So, gotta go to the Islamic Thai shops for beef.

Maybe the system here is old-fashioned, quaint, or a bit backwards ... but everything is really nice, fresh, and tasty compared to supermarket stuff back in the US.

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@transmorpher

It's a little difficult to 'debate' your comment, because the points that you address to me are numbered but don't reference to specific parts of my post. That's probably my fault as i was releasing frustration haphazardly and sarcastically, and that sarcasm wasn't aimed at you. All i can do is try and sum up whether i think we agree or disagree overall.

Essentially everything is a question of 'taste', even for you. There's no escaping our nature, most of us don't drink our own piss, many of us won't swallow our own blood, almost all of us have a flavour that we can't abide because we were fed it as a child. So yes, our decisions are defined by taste. But taste is decided by the food that is available to people, within reasonable distance of their house, at a price they find affordable according to the society around them, from a range of food that is decided by society around them. Your average person does not have the luxury to walk around a high street supermarket selecting the most humane and delicious foods. People get what they can afford, what they understand, what they can prepare and what is available. Our ancestors ate chicken because of necessity of their own kind, their children are exposed to chicken through no fault of their own, fast forward a few generations, and thus chicken becomes an affordable, accessible staple. Can we reach a compromise here? It may not be necessary for chickens to die to feed the human race, but it may be necessary for some people to eat chicken today because of their particular life.

I don't like the use of the phrase 'if i can do it, i know anyone can'. I think it's a mistake to deal in certainties, especially pertaining to lifestyles that you can't possibly know about without having lived them. Are you one of the many homeless people accepting chicken soup from a stranger because it's nourishing, cheap and easy for a stranger to buy, and keeps you warm on the streets? Are you a single mother with coeliac disease, a grumpy teenager and picky toddler who has 20 minutes to get to the supermarket and get something cooking? Or one of the millions using foodbanks in the UK (to our shame) now? I don't think you're willfully turning a blind eye to those people, i'm not tugging heart strings to do you a disservice. Maybe you're just fortunate you not only have the choice, but you have such choice that you can't imagine a life without it. I won't budge an inch on this one, you can't know what people have to do, and we have to accept life is not ideal.

And within that idealism and choice problem we can include illnesses that once again in IDEAL situations could survive without dead animals, nevertheless find it necessary to eat what they can identify and feel safe with.

Yes, those damn gluten hipsters drive me round the bend but only because they make people think that a LITTLE gluten is ok, it makes people take the problem less seriously (see Tumblr feminism... JOKE).

I agree that we must look at what action we can take now - and that is why i keep reminding you that we are not in an ideal world. If the veganism argument is to succeed then you must suggest a reasonable pathway to go from how we are now to whatever situation you would prefer. My "ideal farm" description was just me demonstrating the problem - that you need to show us your blueprint for how we start again without killing animals and feeding everyone we have.

And on that subject, your suggestions need to be backed by real research, otherwise you don't have any real plan. "It's fair to say there is very little risk" is a nice bit of illustrative language but it is not backed by any fact or figure and so i'm compelled to do my Penn and Teller impression and call bullshit. As of right now, the life expectancy of humans is better than it has ever been. It is up to you to prove that changing the diet of 7 billion people will result in neutrality or improvement of health and longevity. That proof must come in the form of large statistical analyses and thorough science. I don't want to sound like i'm being a dick, but any time you state something like that as a fact or with certainty, it needs to be backed up by something. I'm not nit picking and asking for common knowledge to have a citation, but things like this do:

-- 70% of farmland claim
-- 'fair to say very little risk' claim
-- meat gives you cancer claim - i accept it may have a carcinogenic effect but i'll remind you so does breathing, joss-sticks, broccoli, apples and water
-- 'the impact to the planet would be immense' claim - in what way, and what would be the downsides in terms of economy, productivity, health, animal welfare (where are all the animals going to be sent to retire as of day 1?)
-- etc. etc.

Oh, and a cow might get its protein from plants, but it walks around a field all day eating grass, chewing the cud and having sloppy shits with 4 stomachs and enzymes that i don't have................. I'm a bit puzzled by this one... I probably can't survive on what an alligator or a goldfish eats, but i can survive on parts of an alligator or fish. I can't eat enough krill in a day to keep me going, but i can let a whale do it for me...?

Food waste has different causes in different places.

For instance, 45% of tomatoes harvested in Nigeria are lost due to poor Food Supply Chain management. In Kenya 15-35% of their crops are wasted due to the high specifications on appearance by European Union supermarkets. In other places food is wasted because there's no easy way to transport it to markets. In most African nations most of the losses occur early in the food supply chain, but in Europe and North America the losses are more likely to occur much closer to home.

According to http://www.worldfooddayusa.org/food_waste_the_facts consumers in industrialised countries waste almost as much food every year as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (222 million vs. 230 million tons).

Australians discard 20% of the food we purchase (total waste is 4.06 million tonnes of food every year). This works out fairly similar to the 10kg per person per month in the link above for the USA.

There is no new technology required to dramatically improve on these figures, it mostly just requires a desire to do better (and perhaps a bit of education).

Howdy Pardon for interrupting. Yes, Puddles is here in Adelaide for our annual Fringe Festival -> link. And that pie & sauce Youtube video had to have been filmed here in Adelaide as well, as the ketchup was a homebrand from Foodland, which is a local independent South Australian supermarket

Hooray for France!

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/04/french-law-forbids-food-waste-by-supermarkets

ha. it was just a throw away reference to South Park but the term is often used to express sustainable living and quality food by interacting directly with producers rather than factory produced→ supermarket. In this case part of the charm of hand made orriccete is the slight imperfections, but as you say machine pasta doesn't taste any different. I make my own rolled pasta but happy to buy extruded variety as it's just not practical/worth it to do at home.

Thank goodness I buy my beef products from the supermarket where they only have meat from the stupid, non-sentient cows.

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Just to add some context, in Finland there is a tradition of sweets day. One day a week where kids are allowed to have candy. If you go to a supermarket on a Friday evening you will see this just this type of family debate going on.